It’s a common practice to create local WordPress development environments using a copy of the production database. But this can cause problems with a large production site, as the database can become very large, and it is full of non-public information that you may not want to make available to all members of the development team. This is especially problematic when running a plugin like BuddyPress, which allows users to create a great deal of content with various privacy levels.

To work around this problem for the CUNY Academic Commons, I wrote this plugin: cac-database-cleaner. It will remove all non-public data from a WP database, while still leaving an intact database image that can be used to populate a development environment.

WARNING – This is a dangerous tool, as it deletes large amounts of data. Under no circumstances should you install this plugin on a production site. To use: export your production database; import to a separate database and perform any manual changes necessary for the WordPress site to load locally (such as modification of your local hosts file); activate plugin and navigate to Dashboard > Network Admin > CAC Database Cleaner.

Again, do not use this plugin if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

Note that plugin support is ideosyncratic to the CUNY Academic Commons, where we run an old version of BuddyPress Docs, an old fork of BuddyPress Group Documents, a plugin called More Privacy Options, legacy bbPress forums, etc. Feel free to modify the plugin to work with whatever other data you’d like.